


Grannies on the Front Lines and Cougars in the Black Market

by aunt_zelda



Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: Community: pacificrimkink, F/F, Female Friendship, Gen, Genderswap, Male-Female Friendship, Unrequited Crush, everyone is genderswapped
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-13
Updated: 2013-09-13
Packaged: 2017-12-26 12:16:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,242
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/965826
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aunt_zelda/pseuds/aunt_zelda
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Genderswapped AU that took me WAY too long to finish.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Grannies on the Front Lines and Cougars in the Black Market

**Author's Note:**

> For this prompt on the Pacific Rim Kink Meme:  
>  _http://pacificrimkink.livejournal.com/1613.html?thread=1512269#t1512269_  
>  A universe where everyone male was always female instead and vice-versa. Shake with social implications. Garnish with story line alterations as you see fit.   
> Awesome lady scientists Geiszler and Gottleib! Mother daughter Hansen team! Becket sisters! Momma Pentecost and little boy Mori! Reverse Russians! LADY HANNIBAL CHAU! TEAM HOT MOM!!!  
> Anything at all dabbling in such a universe would delight me to no end. Pick your favorite characters and roll, whatever you like!
> 
> This is my favorite kind of genderswapped AU, where it's EVERYBODY. I might do more later, might not.
> 
> Heavy inspiration from these lovely arts on tumblr: http://bridgioto.tumblr.com/tagged/pacific+rim

Nancy is dead.

Every day, Raleigh wakes up with that knowledge, and every night she goes to sleep with that emptiness in her heart. 

Nancy is dead. 

Nancy is dead, and Raleigh was connected to her as she died. She felt her sister’s fear, her regret, and her pain as she was torn apart in that monster’s teeth. 

Raleigh can’t pilot a Jaeger anymore. She tries, but she can’t. Not without Nancy. She leaves the program and travels up and down the coastline. She could ride her fame on talk shows, write a book, but she’d rather fade into the background. She could have done the publicity circuit with Nancy, but not alone. So Raleigh takes odd jobs, learns new languages working alongside fishing crews, dockworkers, and, finally, the construction teams up in Alaska. It’s hard work, but it keeps her mind off of her grief, and eventually, the pain is something she can bear.

But when that Kaiju smashes through the wall in Sydney, and the helicopter lands outside, Raleigh knows the General is here. Stacia Pentecost, the Iron Lady, arrives and asks her to rejoin the program. 

Raleigh doesn’t have to think about it too long. Her only hesitation is at the requirement of a co-pilot. She isn’t sure she can open up to someone again like that, not to mention how they’ll react when they feel Nancy’s death in their head. It’s taken Raleigh years to work through that, to become a functional human being who doesn’t break down at the drop of a hat. It’ll take a strong co-pilot to handle her memories. 

~*~

Makoto is … intriguing. 

For all his proper, respectful mannerisms and devotion to Stacia Pentecost, he has a blue streak through his dark hair, almost Kaiju-blue. There’s a story there, but Raleigh doesn’t ask and Makoto doesn’t volunteer. Makoto barely speaks, actually, but there’s a lot going on in his eyes that Raleigh picks up on pretty quickly.

Stacia is protecting him, for some reason, not letting him into the tryouts despite having a 51 kill score on the Jaeger simulator. 

After enduring a long line of incompatible potentials in the tryouts, Raleigh has had enough.

“Ok, what is your problem?” she snaps at Makoto, leaning on her stick. “You picked these guys yourself, but every time we’re done, you make this, this face,” Raleigh screws up her face in imitation “like you’re disappointed with their performance.”

“Not their performance.” Makoto says. “Yours. You could have taken them all two or three moves beforehand.”

“You think you could do better?” Raleigh grins. She wants to dance with this guy, she has a sneaking suspicion and she wants to be right, she really does. 

“I know I could.”

Raleigh points to Makoto and goads the General, just a little, about whether she thinks her protégé can stack up. Stacia scowls and takes Makoto’s clipboard.

It’s … great. It’s perfect, really. It’s not like with Nancy. Makoto moves differently than Nancy would have, but it’s the same underlying feeling, a playful dance with balance between them. Raleigh could do this all day, gladly, and would much rather do it inside a Jaeger, against a Kaiju. 

“This is my co-pilot,” Raleigh says, slapping Makoto on the back. He smiles at her, face lighting up.

Stacia refuses, bizarrely, much to Raleigh’s frustration. Worse, Makoto doesn’t fight against the decision. 

“You don’t have to obey her,” Raleigh insists, catching up to Makoto in the hallway. 

“It’s not obedience, Ms. Becket. It’s respect.” Makoto says, fumbling with his key.

Raleigh coughs. “That’s, uh … my room.”

Makoto blushes and hurries across the hallway to his room, shutting the door quickly. 

~*~

When Raleigh heard that Hera Hansen was piloting with “Chuck,” she assumed that meant Hera had a son. 

_Charlotte_ “Chuck” Hansen, ten pounds of cocky attitude in a five pound bag, is not at all what Raleigh was expecting. 

Clearly, she isn’t what Chuck was expecting either, apparently, because they clash right away, Chuck saying they don’t need anymore grannies on the front lines and storming out of the mess hall.

Hera shakes her head. “Some days, I don’t know whether to give her a hug or kick in the ass.”

“With respect, ma’am,” Raleigh says, leaning over her food, “I think I know which I’d give her.”

Hera smiles wryly, and devours her dinner. 

~*~

“I’m looking for … Ching Shih Chau?” Nat blinks down at the phonetic notes she took, so she didn’t make a mistake and offend the Black Market Queen. She’s already on edge, coming down here reminds her of walking through certain parts of Boston after a bar crawl with guys from MIT. Like if she stops moving or looking like she knows where she’s going, she’s gonna get grabbed and dragged into an alley.

This huge woman in a crazy red robe with gold-plated shoes looks Nat up and down dismissively. “Who’s asking?”

Nat blinks. Ok, she isn’t sure what she was expecting, but a white lady with a Brooklyn accent wasn’t on her mind. “You’re Ching Shih Chau?” she asks, before she can stop herself. 

“Yeah. You like it? Took it from my favorite historical figure, and my second-favorite Szechuan restaurant in Brooklyn.” Ching Shih stares at Nat. “Aw, look, someone sent me a pretty college dyke.”

The thugs in the room chuckle, some openly leering at Nat.

“They just don’t make ’em like you out here. I mean, I’m as much a fan of the Hong Kong prostitutes as the next person, but there’s nothing like a nice, tight, East Coast pussy.” Ching Shih licks her lips, gold teeth glinting in the light. 

Nat feels her face flush red.

“And you’ve got ink. Rebelling against mommy and daddy?” Ching Shih is pulling at Nat’s sleeves and examining the tattoos. “Good work, at least. Trust fund spent wisely?”

Nat doesn’t say anything. Her cheeks are burning and suddenly she’s remembering all kinds of ridiculous things. Like the fact that she puts on eyeliner and lipstick when she remembers and sleeps with it on, showers with it on, and just reapplies over the old. As a result, her eyes have a perpetually smudged look, which is exacerbated by her random sleeping schedule. And the fact that her hair hasn’t been properly dealt with since she chucked her brush at Helga three weeks ago and it got lost in some corner of the lab, and it’s been nothing but pencils and finger-combing ever since. 

Wait, why is she thinking about any of that? Why give a fuck what she looks like right now?

“Hey, earth to dollface!” and suddenly there’s a _knife_ a freaking butterfly knife, in Ching Shih’s hand, and it feels like it’s halfway up Nat’s nose and pushing for her brain. “What are you here for?”

Nat flails her arms in the air, squeaking with sudden fear and pain. “S-stacia Pentecost sent me! To meet with you! About a Kaiju brain!”

The knife retracts, and Nat rubs at her nose. No blood, at least, she’s had enough bloody noses tonight, thank you very much. 

The thugs are chuckling and Nat is achingly aware of how very small she is compared to Ching Shih. 

And, oh wow, oh no, _so_ not the time to be getting aroused _at all._ Fuck fuck fuckity fuck fuck. Why the Thing for domineering older ladies? Why? Why is freaking Ching Shih Chau one of the scariest, hottest cougars Nat has ever seen? She’s like, a mountain of a woman, clad in silks and topped with a poof of white hair. Ching Shih’s got boobs you could get lost in, and she might be pushing 50 but she’s got an enviable figure, all the right curves and muscular arms that she probably uses to crush men’s skulls or something. There are tattoos on her hands that Nat is dying to ask about even though they’re probably prison tats with personal meanings that Nat’s got no business knowing. 

Ching Shih Chau smirks with a mouth full of gold and Nat hasn’t fallen this hard since college. 

_Fuck_.

~*~

Chuck bears down on Raleigh, dark eyed with fury.

Raleigh can’t remember ever feeling that pissed off when she was that age. Maybe that one time some dickbag treated Nancy badly, but they beat him up in front of a whole bar of his friends, so that pissed off feeling didn’t last long. 

“You two are gonna get us all killed!” Chuck shoves Raleigh.

Makoto steps forward, and Raleigh holds him back in instinct, because that’s exactly what Nancy would be doing now, going to fight. Seeing Makoto try to step in to defend her is … really damn cool. But not what needs to happen right now.

Chuck sneers. “Yeah, keep your little lapdog back. At least one of you bitches needs a leash –”

Raleigh … does not snap. She does not loose her sense of calm, of control. She does, however, reach out and twist Chuck’s arm behind her back. Because Chuck can say whatever shit she likes about Raleigh to her face, but the minute she insults Raleigh’s co-pilot, there’s a problem. 

“Apologize to him,” Raleigh says simply, ducking as Chuck lashes out at her, fists flying.

Chuck telegraphs her attacks; every move she makes is obvious. Raleigh almost feels like a bully, taking the girl down like this, especially when a crowd starts to gather at the end of the hall. But it’s high time that Chuck learned a little respect. 

“Apologize to him!” Raleigh insists, pinning Chuck down on the floor. She’s barely broken a sweat and Chuck is panting and spitting and twisting like a trapped animal.

Stacia and Hera appear, Hera dragging Chuck off and Stacia summoning Raleigh and Makoto inside. Chuck looks like she wants to end things, even though she was losing badly, but her mother drags her down the hallway and out of sight.

Raleigh steels herself and enters Stacia’s office.

~*~

The alarms are blaring, signaling the arrival of a Kaiju. Ching Shih, apparently, isn’t going to provide a brain until after this dies down. And she’s clearing off to her own private bunker. 

“Take me with you!” Nat yelps.

“Like hell!” Ching Shih gives Nat a casual shove. 

Nat stumbles and almost falls on her ass. 

“That thing’s coming for you, kid! It was in your head and it knows where you are. I bet it can track you. So I’m getting as far away from you as possible. Get yourself to a public shelter.”

Then Ching Shih pulls down her goggles and Nat gets to see what she was hiding. One eye, milky white and blind, a ragged scar running right through it. Nat stares. She wonders why Ching Shih didn’t have it replaced with a mother of pearl eye or a gold orb or something. Something to ask later, if she survives all this. 

“I went to a public shelter once … once.” And with that, Ching Shih Chau sweeps out of the room, surrounded by her bodyguards. 

Nat is paralyzed for a moment, her head pounding and another nosebleed on the way, prickling her nostrils. 

She runs out into the streets, buffeted by the crowd flocking to the public shelters. Nat is shoved by a wall of people and falls over a car hood, glasses shattering on the ground. 

Nat turns, sees a Kaiju smashing downtown, ripping a building apart. It’s … beautiful. Utterly beautiful, but she needs to live to drift with one again, and so she runs, shoving with the rest of the crowds, panicked and half-blind and bleeding.

Some people, Nat knows, think it’s a sex thing. They see the ink on her arms, the work that she does, and they make … assumptions. They think she goes to bed with a vibrator and a bunch of tentacle hentai manga every night. Which is not what it is at all, for Nat. It’s not about wanting slimy junk in her every orifice, it’s about studying the most fascinating, unique creatures humanity is ever likely to discover. It’s about picking apart their DNA and their organs, finding out how they work, why they work, and how they think. It’s about something bigger (literally and figuratively) than themselves, than humanity, something alien and deadly and sophisticated enough to clone monsters to send as exterminators to wipe them all out.

Wanting to get double-stuffed by an octopus doesn’t factor in to any of that. That’s like assuming a marine biologist just wants to fuck dolphins, after they spent seven years learning how the creatures communicate. 

She remembers, one night, she and Helga got drunk and Helga actually asked her, if it was a sex thing with the Kaiju. She didn’t talk to Helga for a week, which Helga was actually hurt about, for all her ranting about Nat being such an annoying, chatty bitch. Then Helga yelled some apologies and Nat glared and then they were hugging and back to their usual bitching at each other about workspaces and the line down the middle of the room. Kind of like how Nat’s seen Jaeger pilots “fighting” and then returning to their routines. 

Hey, now there’s an idea. Maybe sharing the neural load with Helga would cut down on the headaches and the nosebleeds. 

Nat makes a mental note of that and waits, in the sweaty, cramped shelter. She waits for the Kaiju to be defeated so she can drift with its brain, and take Helga along for the ride.

**Author's Note:**

> Names:
> 
> Raleigh Beckett – Raleigh Beckett  
> Stacker Pentecost – Stacia Pentecost  
> Mako Mori – Makoto Mori  
> Newton Geiszler – Natalie Geiszler  
> Hermann Gottlieb – Helga Gottlieb  
> Herc Hansen – Hera Hansen  
> Chuck Hansen – Charlotte ‘Chuck’ Hansen  
> Hannibal Chau – Ching Shih Chau
> 
> Raleigh is a gender-neutral name. I considered changing the name to Carolina or Caroline for this fic, and decided against that ultimately.  
> Charlotte “Chuck” Hansen is a Pushing Daisies reference I couldn’t pass up.  
> Newt gave me trouble, and eventually I just settled on Natalie because why not. Her friends call her Nat.  
> Hannibal Chau was my most difficult name change. I went with Ching Shih because that is so someone fem!Hannibal would idolize from history. Seriously, look her up, and tell HBO to give her a miniseries already.


End file.
